That's not a very good example. Athletes are being watched for 4-8 years before they are ever drafted. Colleges are watching all the high school games, and Pros are watching all the college games.

Perhaps--but it's the analogy I came up with while writing this comment. If you can replace it with a better one, go ahead.

Sometimes analogies are not really meant to be perfect, but just simpler methods of communicating information.

> Consider that when athletes are scouted, they are usually not asked to play in a full game of their sport. But instead certain stats like 'how fast can he run 100m' and 'how high can he jump' are used.

Teams rarely sign players based solely on measures like this, and those that do frequently regret it.

Additionally, the nature of contracts in professional sports are very different from regular employment. Players are cut or traded frequently, often find themselves on very team-friendly deals when unproven, and are granted employment in time-limited blocks.

I know. It's just an analogy. You can replace it with a better one if you want.

The general point I am making is: these are not trying to measure actual job tasks, but instead measuring something that (they hope) is closely related to, or correlated with one's ability to perform the job. The idea is that if one can do these sorts of problems, one can probably do the actual job at hand.

> (they hope) is closely related to, or correlated with one's ability to perform the job. The idea is that if one can do these sorts of problems, one can probably do the actual job at hand

This is a claim about the intentions behind these practices.

Intentions aside, the whole point of this perennially recurring discourse is about effectiveness — that certain overused methods of filtering job candidates are ineffective on their own terms — and negative side effects — that they're biased against people with non-traditional / from underrepresented backgrounds.

For almost any sport this is a spectacularly bad metric. Just because it can be measured doesn’t make it meaningful. FWIW, the “fitness” required for sportspersons is a very sport-dependent diffuse constellation of factors.